Monday, September 08, 2014

It's the Information Age.

These people are gnawing on my last exposed nerve. The National Police Service's mucky-mucks must really think we are all complete idiots, morons of the highest order. The Kabete OCS was shot in the hip after attempting to prevent a robbery by five men along Waiyaki Way. Will someone set Mr Inspector-general Kimaiyo straight; we will accept the fact that a policeman was shot, but please spare us the Jack Bauer scenario where he stops his car in the middle of a busy highway and rushes five robbers in an attempt to uphold law and order. At night.

It must be the same Einsteins who have taken us through the carjack drama that ended up in Tororo, Uganda. A car that has on numerous occasions been photographed closely following the ceremonial presidential limo is taken from its policeman driver. Its tracking system is "disabled". It is driven to the Busia border crossing point and over into Uganda. The policeman driver clams that he was carjacked at gunpoint, driven around town in the company of the carjackers, stripped naked and dumped in Ruai. All he loses is a loose sixteh thao, a fancy phone and his dignity. But, please.

If you are in the presidential detail, even if you are the lowly cop that has to stand in the hot sun at a particular corner the President will pass through, you have certain skills. In the words of Bryan Mills from Taken, they are skills that have taken you a career to learn; skills that make you a nightmare for carjackers and sundry criminal elements. They should spare us the tall tales of four-man carjackings. The more likely story is that he originally had a loose hando thao and decided to hæng with his old crew in the Old Man's beemer. But his friends have been jealous of him for a minute. And the moment he starts throwing raos at that Migingo in the forgotten bits of Eastlando, they decide to "activate" their network and the poor cop is given mchele, stripped to his skivvies and left to his own devices.

For a very long time, just like Philip Ochieng admits in the Sunday Nation (07/09/2014), the serikali decided what story the people would be told. And in what tone of voice. The 8-4-4 system became a byword for spoonfeeding a generation. No one thought for themselves anymore. None more so than the men who were appointed to oversee our safety and security. Theirs is to do or die, not to question why. And they have come to believe that all Kenyans fit into that neat little mould. It is why they are confident that the stories they peddle through the dailies are stories we will not question or challenge. We will accept their word for it. And we will continue living in blissful ignorance.

Isn't it time that #TeamDigital stopped treating us the same way the Grand Coalition did which was just an evolution of the KANU Way? We may not have the same quality of libraries that my father's generation did, and many of us might not have access to Jamii Telecom's five-thao-a-month Faiba 5mbps, but the advent of the one-thousand-five-hundred-shillings Mulika Mwizi means that information is accessible at an increasingly affordable price. You have priced us out of the housing market, the transport sector, the high education ivory towers and the privatised healthcare system. But thanks to the enormous capitalistic appetite for billion-shillings profits by Safaricom, #TeamDigital can lie to some of us some of the time, but not to all of us all of the time. It's the Information Age, bitches! Act like it.